Yay, I just got it today (and have yet to play it). I hope I'm not in for a dull linear 20 hour ride full of repetitive killing because I loathe that sort of thing. By the way, that pic of you killing Gearhound had me shedding tears from the laughter! Good one!! :cool guy:

This is it. This is the game that made me buy an Xbox, even though I had never played it before. I already had a Gamecube Nintendo (its proper name) and the Dreamcast was dead. I craved more Sega action! I saw this game sitting on the shelf in Gamestart or some retarded store like that. I looked at the back of the box and it looked cool! I also saw the Dolby Digital 5.1 logo. Until then I really didn't care about the Xbox, rarely read about it, and had no idea that the machine could do 5.1 Dolby Digital sound. I was stoked. So the next day I bought an Xbox, Gunvalkyrie, and probably some other game. And what an awesome game this was. Originally planned for the Dreamcast as a light gun game (which also made use of the D-pad on the light gun itself), Sega decided to kill the Dreamcast and made this for the Xbox instead. I'm glad they did. This game would have been much worse as a light gun game.

You get to watch her ass for the whole game!

Graphics: 7/10
The graphics are really solid, especially for back when I first got my Xbox. Nowadays they won't blow you away, but they still hold up well. You get 480p but are stuck with the 4:3 aspect ratio. Oh well. There are lots of strange colors, but often times the game does tend to lean a bit towards the dark side. Everything is nice and sharp and usually moves with great fluidity. Some of the character designs in this game are really cool, especially the bosses. There is some draw-in waaaaay in the distance if you look, but it in no way makes me want to stop playing the game and go shoot myself or something else silly.

If you don't like bugs, stay away from this game!

Sound: 8/10
The music is pretty good, but not fantastic. There are a few good tunes that play that'll make you want to get out your top hat, baton and tapping shoes. I do own the soundtrack, which was released in the US. Then there is the music in Nalfagar's Pit, if you can call it music. You get a creepy xylophone track accompanied by the crazy ramblings of the game's main whacko (your dad, by the way). It is weird to listen to and definitely creates a very memorable aspect of the game. Haley's chosen! The sound presentation overall is excellent. The Dolby Digital 5.1 features spectacular use of the subwoofer when you jump and dash, and you can hear where the creatures are around you perfectly. The sound effects are all very well recorded and sound great. I'm glad that this was my first experience with Dolby Digital 5.1 during gameplay. I had earlier heard 5.1 during the opening cut-scene on Metal Gear Solid 2 for the PlayStation 2, but it couldn't compare to this. Plus the PlayStation 2 can't do Dolby Digital during the actual gameplay.

Use your grappling beam to get across quickly, OMG!

Gameplay: 8/10
For me this was a very fun game. You have a map and on it you can see your enemies, and you simply MUST destroy them all! Every last damn one of them. I liked seeking out that one enemy I missed, killing him, and then being able to complete the stage. The boss fights can be very involving, but they are all cool and exciting. The controls couldn't be better. With a small bit of practice you can even learn to fly, which is even required in some of the earlier stages when you're playing over a giant pit. The opening stage features a built-in tutorial explaining how to jump, dash, etc. You can get a few extra weapons and stronger suits, but no one really cares about that. Sometimes you use a grappling beam to get across chasms... I think that might be similar to Metroid Prime, I dunno. Metroid Prime becomes extremely boring after the first 12 or 13 seconds or so. But I swear I remember Samus using an electrical beam to get across something, and I thought "they ripped that off from Gunvalkyrie!" My memory may be jacked up since even short-term exposure to Metroid Prime can destroy millions of brain cells. Anyway, you can also play as some loser dude, but I don't think anyone's ever played as him. He's in there just so it seems like you have more options. This game is insanely hard and you really have to practice A LOT to beat it. Damn! I think most people just give up and think the game sucks. But for me, this is a classic Sega game and one that belongs on every Xbox owners shelf.

Wrap up:
One of the most overlooked and underrated titles for the Xbox.

If I we're to buy a Xbox it would because of Smilebit games. Gunvalkyrie, Jet Set Radio Future and Panzer Dragoon Orta are three beautiful and well made games for the Xbox. To bad there ain't more of them.

All Sega card games had the same hand
holding the card. The drawing of Transbot
himself is superb, and the artist definitely
earned his $2,000 fee for this one.

Back in 1986, Sega wondered what would be the best way to make themselves a household name. They decided that they had to program fantastic games that offered a new and exciting experience for the game player. So they made Transbot, a game where you can play not only as a spaceship, but also as a robot! Most games only let you play as a spaceship or a robot, but never both. Transbot exploded into stores everywhere and sold a dozen copies, a new record for Sega. Record low, that is.

Check out the photorealistic graphics here.
You'd swear that was the real Mt. Fuji in the background!

Graphics: 5/10
I hope you like repetition! Considering that this low-memory game exists on a card, I was very surprised to see multiple (well, 2 anyway) layers of scrolling. That was amazing. The rest of the graphics popped off the screen with amazing blandness. There is very little animation in the game at all. When you are a robot, your legs will sway when you are moving back or forward. But most enemies only have a single frame to their design and just scroll through the stages. The boss does have a bit of animation, though. Try to keep your eyeballs in your sockets.

Transform into a nuclear creature
and destroy this ungrateful world!

Sound: 3/10
I hope you like repetition! Not very many musical pieces in the game at all. They are a bit catchy at first, but you'll hear them so much that you'll begin to get sick of them quickly. The sound effects are what you'd expect to hear from an Atari 2600 game. If this game didn't have music, you'd swear you had an Atari 2600 hooked up to your surround sound system cranking out the noise. But the Sega Master System can actually play more than one note/sound at a time, so Transbot comes off as very technically advanced. Panzer Dragoon ain't got nothin' on this.

Since this was such a popular game, George Lucas
insisted that his scout walkers from The Empire Strikes
Back be digitally inserted into every copy.

Gameplay: 2/10
I hope you like repetition! You fly around and shoot enemies that come in patterns. The enemies rarely ever take a shot at you. Mostly they just annoy you to death. Every once in awhile, some dumbass drives along the bottom of the screen. You can shoot and murder him and then steal his cargo! Unfortunately all he seems to ever transport is a giant question mark. Must be a huge demand for question marks these days. And I can see why, because when you touch the question mark that he was transporting, part of the screen starts flashing a few letters in alphabetical order. Hit a button and that letter becomes your new weapon! Some of the letters turn you into a robot! OMG! OMG! But all of the letters except for A eventually wear down, and you become the sad little default ship again, flying over the same landscape forever and ever (or so it seems). You'll eventually get to a new screen and even indoors, but it really isn't worth your time or mine.

LOL --- Joe, That was quick on getting to the review. Now transbot will fade back into obscurity.

I have had that game forever but don't remember playing a whole lot of it in the 80's or once I got the import cart versions. Obviously, by your ratings, I can see why it never stuck out in my mind as a memorable game.

One thing after seeing your shots I noticed. The game looks very similar to the Famicom game "Transformers: Mystery of Comvoy by Takara" both the ships & robot. The big difference is in the color schemes. TF was another very bland and sorry shooter that also had the very rare feature you pointed out. Being able to be two things in a game instead of just one (Transbot = Ship & Robot) (Transformers = Truck & Robot). Aside from that cool feature, the game blew. It had a pattern that once you got down became so repetitive that it would put you to sleep faster than watching the 2nd half of (Spike Lee's - Malcolm X).

Wonder if that is George Castanza's hand holding the card?
Wasn't there an episode on Seinfeld where he was gonna be a "hand model"?

Joe ~ "Since this was such a popular game, George Lucas
insisted that his scout walkers from The Empire Strikes
Back be digitally inserted into every copy."

While we're on the subject (of plagarism), don't you think that the second boss in Axelay is a blatant ripoff of ED-209 from Robocop?

BTW, I was pleasantly suprised to find that my copy of R-Type III was missing from my SNES collection. I guess somebody decided that I didn't deserve it and took it upon themself to relieve me of ownership. That leaves me with R-Type on TG16, but since you recently reviewed it, I don't even see the point.... I'll have to pick a different shooter in its stead. A "suprise" shooter.

Oh, and great review, as usual. Keep up the great work. Speaking as a writer, your stuff is getting better by the day. I think I speak for everybody when I say that your effort is much appreciated, so thumbs up to you. :cool guy:

Thanks! Good point about the Robocop/Axelay comparison. I've only seen Robocop once, so the thought didn't occur to me until you pointed it out. So there will be no mention of it in the Axelay review I've already written.

Poor Transbot. This will be the last anyone ever mentions of him. I want to see that Transformers game and also a game based on Spike Lee's Malcolm X.

The SNES wasn't exactly known for its great shooters. Well, it couldn't have been... it simply didn't pack a fast enough CPU to pull off a great shooter. But that didn't stop a few companies from trying. One of the more notable efforts is definitely Konami's Axelay. Comprised of both overhead and side scrolling action (like Thunder Force 2, except you can only scroll up in the overhead stages), Axelay comes packed on an 8 megabit (1 megabyte) cartridge, but only uses a little over 6 megabits of memory. That's about a megabit per stage. Axelay ends up being the best shooter ever... for the SNES.

It's a giant turd! Don't touch!

Graphics: 8/10
Axelay pulls off just about every effect you can ask for... scaling, rotation, even scrolling! The overhead stages have a unique effect applied to the scrolling. As the imagery scrolls downward, it expands vertically, but not horizontally. It's sort of a 1-dimensional scaling effect since it only grows in one plane. It creates sort of a "curved" effect which is absolutely bizarre. When there are two layers of this going on, the bottom layer only resizes to a little over halfway down the screen, and then it just starts scrolling straight down without scaling. I'm not sure what I really think of this effect. It's not like things are coming from a distance, as there is zero perspective. It's more like it's being "unrolled" from a scroll. And since the SNES cannot scale sprites, the enemies do not grow larger as they "approach", making the effect even more strange looking. The only exception is when an enemy ship is actually a background layer. I'll give it points for uniqueness, but that's it. The rest of the graphics are very sharp, and the side scrolling stages are well drawn, detailed, and can feature up to 3 layers of scrolling at a time. Colors are very well used throughout the game, but there is some flicker and things do seem kind of small. There are a few bosses that have some cool designs, like the walking thingy of level 2, but its implementation is kind of jerky.

The benefits of these employees have
expired. Time to take them out!

These graphics here kind of
remind me of a Neo Geo game.

Sound: 8/10
There are two voices in the game. One that tries to make some sort of weird announcement as you approach the boss of any given stage that is unintelligible, and the voice that says "Arms installation is completed. Good Luck!" before each stage which sounds very real (no digitizing artifacts). On the music side of things you'll find that Souji Taro composed some fantastic tunes for the game, with a little help from M.C. Ada who did level 2's music which is apparently not original to this game. Wherever it's from, it rocks! The music gets pretty boring for the last 2 stages, however. And even stage 4's music gets old kind of quick. The sound effects are all fairly average. Explosions sound pretty flat, and just about every sound in the game has at least a small amount of the typical SNES reverb applied to it that I hate so much.

The fire dragon enemy from
the Gradius series makes a cameo!

Gameplay: 7/10
As mentioned earlier, there are overhead stages which scroll vertically and side scrolling stages as well. They alternate and there are only 6 stages. That's it. What is a bit unique about this game is that there are no power ups at all throughout the stages. You choose your weapons before the stage begins. After each stage you have a new weapon to chose from in one category. If you get hit by enemy fire, you loose the weapon you are using. Once you loose all 3 weapons you use the basic wimpy attack and then after that you die. You can also die if you touch an enemy directly no matter how many weapons you have left. It's a pretty good shooter, but some of the stages tend to drag on and get boring (especially stages 4 and 6). I keep thinking to myself "OK I'm bored. I'm ready for something to happen now... or at least change". Playing through the first few levels is always fun mainly due to the great music, but once you hit stage 4 there really is no reason to continue after a few minutes in there. I'm not sure if I preferred the overhead more than the side scrolling stages or vice-versa, but the pace is a bit slow on both modes. There is a TON of slowdown and it really interferes with the gameplay and detracts greatly from it. The SNES just can't handle games that require much, if any movement. It's as the same clock speed as the Sega Master System and trying to handle tons more information at once for Chris'sake! It's like trying to watch HDTV on the Game Gear... not the greatest idea. But given that, I'm impressed with what Konami was able to pull off here, and it remains a worthy game. It is fairly challenging, and once you beat it the game just repeats from stage 1 (minus the weapons you've acquired for some reason) even after you beat it on hard. There is a decent intro and ending to the game, and there is some sort of locket involved, but hell if I know what it's significance means. Oh well. I don't play games for the story. I play games to have fun. If I rated in decimals, the gameplay would get a 7.4 or so, as would the overall game. Remember, 5 is average for the system, 7 is definitely not bad!

It's the boss! Time to request a raise and some
vacation time. The boss disapproves, of course.
How he got promoted, I'll never know.

Wrap up:
Definitely the best shooter for the SNES, but certainly not as good as Genesis shooters like Thunder Force IV and Gaiares, etc.